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North Korea

..your doing that thing again with snipets. my post was clear so i don't understand the point you're trying to make.

That act was this: In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, the US dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had dropped in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. This carpet bombing, which included 32,000 tons of napalm, often deliberately targeted civilian as well as military targets, devastating the country far beyond what was necessary to fight the war. Whole cities were destroyed, with many thousands of innocent civilians killed and many more left homeless and hungry.

Vietnam is commonly held up as an example of a war that the U.S. didn't win. So again, I wonder what we mean by "overkill". Usually that term refers to far more of something than is necessary, whereas if they still lost then by definition it was LESS than necessary.

Given the targetting of cites and the death rate of civilians it is clear the US bombing was so excessive that it was a war crime and thus fundamentally inappropriate, ergo it was overkill.

English is a strange language with words almost always having more than one meaning. So is it a reading problem you have, maybe a limited vocabulary and no way to look up words or just a desire to poke fun and derail other peoples' postings?

But given that it's the self-evident goal of any army to "win the war", I continue to wonder how not doing enough to win the war constitutes doing too much. How is not doing enough greater than that required?

If I use 1000 ant traps to get rid of the ants in my house, but when I'm done I still have ants, how does it make any logical sense to say that I used more than necessary?

..your assuming that the us goal is only to "win the war". that is not always possible so it is not. it is to teach lessons or convey warnings that should anyone challenge the us this is what will happen.

..so do you believe the ordinance used was reasonable? is that your point?

eta:

..while vietnam was consider a loss for the us it was really a much heavier loss for vietnam imo.

Feel free to go back to the Etruscans for this, if it helps, but I'm not aware of any army in a war whose goal was anything other than to win it. I'm not cheerleading for violence when I note this, but I'm just not aware of any army, ever, whose goal was just to do the best they could and show good sportsmanship.

Why exactly are you people debating with Magoo? He'll keep needling you till you have no skin left to puncture. This is really depressing. I supported bringing Magoo back here because he's a human being and I don't like treating people like crap. But to take his comments seriously, on a topic of such immediate importance to the cause of sovereignty and world peace? That's over the top. We didn't debate with those kinds of provocateur views when we were fighting against the U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia. This is half a century later. He wants to know how Korea is the fault of the U.S.?? Just smile at him.

I could have said the same, with the difference that I knew pretty much exactly what you were going to say.

And I thought it might be rude.

I'm not even trying to claim that U.S. aggression didn't play some role in the current situation, but if there is any part of the world which is an example of a cold war museum, it is Korea. And even though one of the perpetrators is no longer around to help, it is pretty clear this situation really won't be solved by the U.S., despite cheetoface's bluster.

Feel free to go back to the Etruscans for this, if it helps, but I'm not aware of any army in a war whose goal was anything other than to win it. I'm not cheerleading for violence when I note this, but I'm just not aware of any army, ever, whose goal was just to do the best they could and show good sportsmanship.

​But of course armies by themselves don't necessarily make policy, nor provide objectives. In many cases, certainly in the case of the USA, it is politicians who determine what the military objective is.

​Need I say that the aims of politicians can be quite different than the aims of generals? As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the US sometimes engages in military action to 'inoculate' an area against governments or citizens who don't want to do what the USA would have them do. In such a case, 'winning' merely means keeping some people from governing, or setting the agenda.

Did the US win or lose in Iraq? Did they win or lose in Libya? All depends on what the objective was. If the objective - which was certainly stated by many, if not specifically by the political leaders - was to bomb those countries back to the stone age, they succeeded marvelously.

For the US, it isn't about winning specific battles, or even wars. It is about maintaining control. That is why even tiny third world countries need to be 'disciplined' from time to time. Is that 'winning'? Not necessarily from the military's point of view.

The Korean War further bound organized labor to the ruling order on racist grounds. Military tensions between communist and capitalist blocs escalated with the prospects of an inevitable German and Japanese surrender, the expansion of Soviet influence, the probability of a communist victory in China, and the perceived need of the Anglo-American plutocracy to restore German and Japanese economies as anti-communist bulwarks regardless of moral cost.

In 1944, Washington unilaterally decided that Japan would run the Korean economy after the war. Five days before Japan formally surrendered military control of Korea to the United States, and just after Soviet forces entered the war against Japan on August 8 as Stalin had pledged to do at Yalta, U.S. military officers engineered a formal division of the country.[1]

Forty years earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt had given Korea to Japan in return for Tokyo’s acceptance of the U.S. conquest of the Philippines. Both Washington and London hoped to steer Japan toward Korea and Manchuria and away from the Philippines and Britain’s Asian colonies in Burma, Malaya and Singapore. This foreign policy strategy was designed to thwart the interests of Germany and Russia in Asia. It allowed Japan to strip Korea of its resources and its women of their dignity, as they compelled hundreds of thousands of Koreans to submit to the Japanese army as “comfort women, while over six million Korean men served in slave battalions.”[2....

Sure the US/SK did not win the war, so their tactics in that sense are open to question. But it is now a pretty much a truism that wars cannot be won in the air. I am sure that the bombing may have demonized the Americans to such a point that it was counter productive (as long as conquer was the final goal), more is not always better.

Because regardless of what U.S. policy may have been 40 years earlier, after the war there was a partition line. It wasn't the U.S. which violated that situation.

And by saying that, I am not excusing the U.S. of any provocation or atrocity which may have come afterwards. I am saying that they did not start that war. And bottom line, the current situation in Korea was a team effort.

On August 14, 1945, Rockefeller employee Captain John J. McCloy, head of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) and “Chairman of the American Establishment,” directed two young colonels, Dean Rusk and Charles Hartwell Bonesteel, to enter a room and map out Korea’s division, despite majority Korean opposition. Curator of Anthropology for Yale’s Peabody Museum, Cornelius Osgood, “an experienced observor of Korea,” concluded in a confidential report to the Secretary of the Army that Koreans “would never support a separatist policy.” Cumings drew a historical analogy: “No Korean accepted the division as permanent in 1950, just as no American in the civil war years of the 1860s would have accepted a foreign policy decision to divide the United States five years earlier.”[3]

Caucasians Rusk and Bonesteel decided otherwise, and settled on the 38th parallel, even though they felt that the Soviets might protest a line drawn too far north. Stalin said nothing. On September 9th, the first US military detachment consisting of eight officers and ten enlisted men arrived. They met with their Japanese counterparts who formally surrendered to American Lt. General John Reed Hodge. No Korean was allowed to witness the formal ceremony.

A week later, the communist Korean People’s Army (KPA) formed in Seoul, South Korea. It established peasant associations and labor unions, with two-thirds of its ranks drawn from the peasantry and one-fifth from the proletariat. With respect to the North Korean Workers Party, a 1949 U.S. military top-secret study of 1,881 “cultural cadres” found that 66% came from the poor peasantry while 19% were proletarians. On September 19, Korean-born communist Kim Il Sung, an “anti-Japanese patriot” son of religiously devout Protestants, returned to his native land, battle-hardened from fighting the Japanese in Manchuria since 1932. Within six months in 1946, 4.2 million peasants received land in North Korea.[4]

Rhee behaved as if the brutal Japanese occupation had never ended. Cumings noted, “The absence during the Occupation of any serious removals of Koreans who served the Japanese meant, of course, the perpetuation of a colonized elite in every walk of South Korean life. Rhee reinforced and protected pro-Japanese elements, especially in the police and the military, something he sought to camouflage with noisy bluster against the Japanese.” [6]

Lt. General Hodge formed a full-fledged military government in South Korea, though he initially lacked any kind of international mandate. He had to accept Rhee, despite suspecting him of planning a military coup on his own: “Rhee … is guilty of a heinous conspiracy against American efforts … I have real dope Rhee in deep.” Many times, Hodge was on the verge of arresting him for corruption and assassinations of political opponents, but held off because there was no viable alternative that would not be pro-communist. This Korean police state could not have survived a day without massive U.S. support. [7]

The south was occupied by the Americans. The north was occupied by the Soviets, and neither was going to budge. Regrettable yes, but it was definitely a case of it taking two to tango. Had that not been the case we probably would have a unified Korea (likely also not to everyone's liking), something which very nearly happened in both directions at different times since WW2.

..that to me is not the chase. we are fast approaching in our discussion of how the war started. this is a good piece i have posted and i'm learning lots from it. i will continue in educating myself and post what i find interesting that brings us to today.

In May 1948, Rhee held elections. On election eve, he arrested thirty of his leading opponents. Even so, Rhee’s party garnered only 48 seats in the Assembly, with 120 going to the left-wing opposition. The new Assembly called for unification of the country, even if on the North’s terms.

Rhee’s Japanese-trained army commanders of his South Korean Army (ROKA) were furious, and ordered their men to go on a savage rampage. Under the watchful eye of the U.S. Army, the ROKA massacred more than 30,000 civilians on the southern Korean island of Cheju between October 1948 and February 1949. Many were forced to kneel with their hands tied behind their backs before being doused with gasoline and set afire while alive. General Hodge had characterized Cheju Island before the massacre as “a truly communal area…peacefully controlled by the People’s Committee without much Comintern [i.e. Soviet] influence.” [23]

The number killed in this one of many atrocities inflicted upon the Korean people was more than ten times the number of lives lost in the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Washington used 9/11 as the pretext to initiate an invasion of Afghanistan, and afterwards Iraq. Is it any wonder then that war broke out between northern and southern Korea? But at the time, Washington censors succeeded in preventing the truth from emerging. [24]

During 1949, the New YorkHerald Tribune reported, “An unadmitted shooting war between the Governments of the U.S. and Russia [sic] is in effect today along the 38th parallel …Only American money, weapons, and technical assistance enable [South Korea] to exist for more than a few hours … [South Korea is] a tight little dictatorship run as a police state.”[25]

The first battle, May 4, 1949—the biggest–initiated a series of clashes that culminated in the publicly declared start of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. This May 4th combat occurred when Rhee’s forces crossed the 38th parallel, only to have two of his infantry companies defect to the communist side. Numerous August skirmishes led the U.S. Korean Military Advisory Group Commander, General W.L. Roberts, to conclude, “Each was in our opinion brought on by the presence of a small south Korean salient north of the parallel …the South Koreans wish to invade the North. … almost every incident has been provoked by the South Korean security forces.” By June 25, 1950, hundreds of troops had been killed as thousands of soldiers fought countless small engagements. Convincing evidence has yet to be shown that the North was preparing to invade the South. The only U.S. newspaper Cumings found that published the truth about how the war began was the U.S. Communist Party’s Daily Worker.[26]

"...China is reportedly preparing for possible conflict. A US official told CNN the Chinese air force appeared to have put land-attack-cruise-missile-capable bombers 'on high alert' on Wednesday. In Russia, a Kremlin spokesman refused to comment on media reports based on observations by local residents that its military was moving hardware and troops toward Russia's own border with North Korea. The Asahi Shimbun reported Japanese preparations for the mass evacuation of Japanese nationals from South Korea in the event of conflict.

This weekend a highly secretive meeting of the heads of intelligence agencies from the 'Five Eyes' network, comprising the US, Britain, CANADA, Australia and New Zealand, is due to take place in New Zealand.

In parallel with the Trump administration's threats against North Korea, the US and international media continue an endless stream of propaganda denouncing Pyongyang as a 'rogue regime' and openly debating the pros and cons of various forms of military action in a bid to condition public opinion..."

But Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Friday the Trudeau government would prefer to focus its attention on diplomacy.

Trump sending naval forces to Korea is not a good thing, just as bombing Syria was not a good thing. But given Trumps behaviour my guess it has more to do with distraction and poll numbers than schooling a nation that stands up to empire.

Seems to me that latter spin is just the same bandwagon that Trump and Kim are riding on, and which both use to bolster their power. Everyone spinning that same militaristic line is just helping those two. Sajjan seems to be declining to hop onboard.

There have been enough articles about Trump bluffing here (as he probably is), and none that I have seen about this also being a test of just how reckless Kim is. They have talked for years about being able to hit the US, and they will soon have a target to test that pledge.

Not to downplay the risk (because it is a dangerous and very risky situation) but is this going to be another Yeonpyeong Island or not? Since it most likely will not be, it won't only be Trump who will be shown as more talk than action.

We do know for sure that the South Korean army retreated south accompanied by their U.S. military “advisors” killing tens of thousands of unarmed civilians along the way, including many women, children and unconvicted prisoners. After the war ended in 1953, “Many of these human butchers and their children…[became] rich and powerful,” [52] following the example set by Japanese war criminals.

One of these joint U.S. Army/ROKA bloody episodes involved a US Army Lieutenant Colonel advising his South Korean counterpart that “it would be permitted” to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners. In the course of a few weeks at the war’s onset, over 100 thousand leftists and their sympathizers were killed without charge or trial and dumped in mass graves in at least 168 sites uncovered to date—or just dropped into the ocean.[53]

quote:

One particularly gruesome three-day slaughter of hundreds of women, children and old men became the subject of a Pulitzer Prize winning book based on interviews with over 500 U.S. veterans and a trove of data, including “yards of files of declassified military documents.” Still, no formal apology was forthcoming from Washington, although President Clinton issued a statement of “deep regret.” [55]

Contrast the Korean and U.S. soldiers’ genocidal rampage to North Korean treatment of Southerners when they briefly took control of South Korea from Rhee and the Americans:

Every soldier and official behaved like a political officer, using extensive face-to-face communications. Workers were quickly brought into mass organizations, and students held endless rallies to support the war and volunteer. Korea’s long-abused women were a major target of the regime. The Women’s League established organizations at every level, its workers distributing pamphlets door-to-door. Every PC had to have at least one woman; “women held jobs of honor, worked at employment usually denied them, [and] sometimes went around calling each other tongmu [comrade].” If a soldier met a woman in the street, he would lecture her on woman’s equality.[56]

In that liberating summer of 1950, many women were elected to the people’s committees that governed the countryside. More land distribution took place, especially for poor peasants, than at any time in the history of southern Korea where Rhee’s regime routinely compelled the peasantry to supply rice to Japan. [57]

The three major themes stressed by communist educators were “reunification, land reform, and the restoration of the people’s committees.”[58] U.S. military researchers judged the communist economic and social programs to be a stunning example of grassroots democracy i.e. “a nearly autonomous administration, answerable to the community through elections” that provided services “on a scale never attempted before.”[59]Washington ignored this progressive pedagogy because it ran counter to NSC 68’s new world order blueprint that commanded the U.S. to meet “each fresh challenge promptly and unequivocally.”

Truman did not consult a single European or Asian ally, nor Congress—but only his foreign policy advisors—when he sent American troops into the Korean conflict. He had learned from his Missouri handlers, the Kansas City Pendergast gang; just follow orders from the boss, even when the boss is involved on city streets in “machine gun terrorism” as the Associated Press characterized Kansas City government. The main difference was that “Wild Bill” Donovan had replaced Tom Pendergast.

Truman followed the precedent set by FDR’s secret summer 1941 war in the Atlantic. One could wage war without declaring it, a violation of the Constitution to which all the lawyers in Congress acquiesced, except one, the “people’s congressman”—Vito Marcantonio. He was soon out of office when the Democrats, Republicans and Liberals ganged up to support one James Donovan who defeated Marcantonio for re-election the year the Korean War became front-page news. Meanwhile, charter Pendergast gang member, William Marshall Boyle, Jr., chaired the Democratic National Committee until he resigned in 1951 due to an influence peddling scandal. Truman worked fast. One day was all it took for him to respond to NSC 68 and Acheson’s stage directions. As Stephen Ambrose observed, “For a man who had been surprised, he recovered with amazing speed.”[60]

On June 26th, Truman expanded the Truman Doctrine to incorporate the Pacific Ocean. He ordered the U.S. navy and air force to provide military support to South Korea, and interposed the U.S. Seventh Fleet between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan to thwart an inevitable communist victory on this large island. The head of the Democratic Party pledged formal aid to the French fighting Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces in Indochina, the CIA-subsidized Philippine government fighting a communist uprising, and right-wing terrorists in Indonesia.

The United Nations followed Truman’s lead and passed a resolution to support military action in Korea because it routinely accepted the U.S. and South Korean positions as gospel. The UN “became a partisan in the civil conflict” with its UN Temporary Commission on Korea following Rhee around like a dog.[61]

The UN resolution marked the first time in history that an international organization had ordered an army to war. It happened only because the Soviets were staging a boycott to protest UN recognition of Chiang’s Taiwanese government as the legitimate UN representative for China. Meanwhile the British and French had already recognized the Chinese Communist government, something that Washington did not do until 1979, thanks to Chiang’s stolen Chinese gold going into Congressional pockets.

"China hopes all parties can exercise 'restraint' on the DPRK issue, and not take 'provocative actions', said Chinese President Xi Jinping during a phone conversation with his US counterpart Donald Trump on Monday..."

"Local activists have been very vocal about the deployment of the US system, saying the presence of THAAD would make them a prime target for Pyongyang. The protesters also said the system poses health and environmental problems. The protest continues..."

..i was reading somewhere that because of the government scandals going on in in south korea the current regime is on it's way out. the (expected) incoming party does not agree with what is going on and is in favour of talks with north korea. this is one of the reasons for the move by the us now. so the opposite of people wanting nukes.

Meanwhile the movement for South Korea to have its own nuclear deterrent to North Korea’s increased nuclear weapons threat is growing amongst the population. Whose fault is that?

Don't they trust the US to use their nukes that are in South Korea and on subs in and around that part of Asia?

Some of them might not. There are people in the ROK with views to the right of Washington.

And for a lot of the people who want nukes, it might not be so much a question of wanting the weapons to be used, but rather a question of Koreans themselves having more autonomy over deciding if and when the weapons do get used. I believe similar concerns propelled De Gaulle to pursue an independent nuclear arsenal for the French, as he simultaneously weakened France's connection with NATO.

As for whether or not the idea contradicts the conciliatory policies offered by front-runner Moon Jae-in, well, as epaulo said, a lot of the movement toward his party is probably a reaction against the Choi Soon-sil scandal. So not everyone who is voting for him is likely in agreement with all aspects of the party platform.

I'm surprised it was as high as 60%. Though I suspect that this is one of those positions like Canadians saying "Electoral reform? Great idea!!" on an opinion poll, but then voting for parties that do absolutely nothing to advance that cause.

Don't they trust the US to use their nukes that are in South Korea and on subs in and around that part of Asia?

There are no US nuclear weapons stationed in or stored in South Korea... they were removed almost two decades ago. Ships that stop there have to down load them to another ship before they enter SK waters or ports. The rest is about what damned said. It's about control...

..if anyone has read the stuff i have been posting up thread, the south korean state has a long history of repressing it’s people..with the support of the us and eventually canada.

..while not on quite the same scale this repression continues today. since before joining babble in 2011 i have always been impressed with how many people the unions could get out into the streets or shut down an entire corporate sector. and time after time the state, in it’s implementation of the neoliberal agenda, has resorted to the courts, arresting union leadership and police violence to end the disputes. here is a sampling of those struggles today.

..south korea has very powerful elites. some of the world’s largest transnationals come out of south korea. and i don’t believe for a second the push for nuclear weapons is coming from the bottom up. it is though, i believe, being manufactured from the top down. and we know how that works..like the war against terrorism.

..the anti nuke force is broad. and having lived their lives under a constant threat nuclear war, south koreans are sophisticated on the subject. i don't buy that the population see nukes as a deterrent.

The anti-nuclear movement in South Korea consists of environmental groups, religious groups, unions, co-ops, and professional associations. In December 2011, protesters demonstrated in Seoul and other areas after the government announced it had picked sites for two new nuclear plants.[1]
Among the most active South Korean organizations in the anti-nuclear movement is the Korea's largest environmental NGO, the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM). KFEM leads campaigns for a denuclearization, both in terms of weapons reduction and power generation solutions.

quote:

In January 2012, 22 South Korean women's groups appealed for a nuclear free future, saying they believe nuclear weapons and power reactors "threaten our lives, the lives of our families and all living creatures". The women said they feel an enormous sense of crisis after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, which demonstrated the destructive power of radiation in the disruption of human lives, environmental pollution, and food contamination.[3]

Meanwhile, U.S. troops began installing a missile defense system known as THAAD in South Korea. The deployment drew protests from hundreds of villagers in Seongju, South Korea, who clashed with police as troops began deploying THAAD hardware on a local golf course. This is protest leader Lee Seok-ju.

Lee Seok-ju: "THAAD is a weapon and can only trigger wars. Negotiation between South Korea and the North is the only way to ease tensions, maintain peace—not by deploying THAAD missiles."

The deployment of THAAD is also opposed by Chinese officials, who say the missile system actually aims to counter China’s military power in the region, not to contain North Korea.

Last Thursday(4.06): 2,550 S. Koreans, including residents in Seongju County and Gimcheon City of Gyeongbuk-do(province), filed a suit with the Constitutional Court against the THAAD deployment moves of the U.S. and S. Korean authorities... At the same day the 'Seongju Committee for Struggle against THAAD Deployment', 'Gimcheon Citizens Measure Committee against THAAD Deployment' and other organizations held a press conference outside the Constitutional Court to file the suit...(source: Yonhap)

Two days later(4.08): Activists from all across S. Korea arrived by "Peace Buses"...to protest the planned THAAD deployment in Seongju's vicinity.

Thousands of people gather in Seongju, located some 300 kilometers south of Seoul, to protest the government's decision to allow the U.S. to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery in their town on April 8...(source: Yonhap, 4.09/Here you'll get the detailed report, incl. lots of pics, by KCTU)

Last Saturday(4.01) evening(KST) in central Seoul: About 2,000 (mainly young)people gathered @Gwanghwamun to protest the planned THAAD deployment in S. Korea. During the rally/demo(supported by KCTU) the participants assured that they'll join - by all means - the ant-THAAD resistance in the afflicted region(Seongju County, Gyeongbuk-do)...

Lets see the RT story was likely written on April 27 th and published on April 28 reporting on a request made on April 23 to a April 26 to 28th meeting. This story was written before the ASEAN meeting ended and published its statement on the same date as the RT story.